Thursday, February 7

7 posts in this topic

All these problems are evergreen. However, three modern trends are making them worse. The first is the enthusiasm for rewarding employees for performance. This is driven by the reasonable insight that paying everyone the same spurs no one to excel. Alas, paying for performance can also have perverse consequences. Banks that pay big bonuses for big profits give traders an incentive to take big risks. Institutions that reward relative performance (ie, did you perform better than your colleagues?) encourage unscrupulous co-workers to sabotage each other. Dancers at the Bolshoi are paid primarily according to the amount of time they spend on stage, so an understudy may not be completely heartbroken if the lead ballerina breaks an ankle.

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Their expertise in this art form continues to grow each year thanks to the Boston Ballet (BB), which will be presenting its fourth annual sampler/showcase on Friday, Feb. 15. Busloads of school kids will pack the Strand Theatre for a free 11 am school performance, and troops of neighborhood groups will do the same for the free 7p.m. evening show, both highlighted by Dot’s own Boys in Motion students from the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School.

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The thing that all great dancers have in common is perfect economy of motion in which every step is looked upon as an opportunity. Bouder's every small glissade becomes another step that can in some way give a deeper expression to the sonic texture of the music. Her passages of balletic pantomime reveal character and plot in a ballet that ostensibly has neither. Each balance Bouder sustains is not so much a chance for showing off (well, perhaps just a little bit of that) as much as it puts a visual punctuation mark on a musical phrase. This ballet requires its lead to be a prima ballerina in the fullest sense. Every lift, jump, fouetté, pirouette and piqué turn in the classical ballet trick bag is here and Bouder does it all with perfect clarity. There's no extraneous adornment to her dancing and yet nothing less than everything you could possibly want is delivered.

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Through this visual-aural landscape prowl eight members of Armitage Gone! Dance, two guest artists (Charles Askegard and Cristian Laverde König), and five women who are part of the company’s Professional Project. The men wear light-brown briefs and the women even briefer panties and bras edged in red, with a few red dresses worn by the Professional Project dancers (costumes by Alba Clemente and Deanna Berg MacLean). I say “prowl” because the dancers often move like animals out hunting—sleek, hot, hungry, and calculatingly skillful. The principal women are sometimes on pointe, sometimes in flesh colored socks, and little that they do looks “beautiful” in a balletic ways.....

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The program ended with Alexei Ratmansky’s "Concerto DSCH" with one Justin Peck back in the corps. This ballet sprang to mind often while watching "Paz de La Jolla" but seeing them on the same program showed that while influences are there, the choreographers have two distinct voices. Now nearly five years old, "Concerto DSCH" looks good (though perhaps not quite as good) danced by an almost entirely corps, with Troy Schumacher so new to his lead role (a last minute replacement for an ailing Sean Suozzi) that his presence wasn’t even announced.

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I chatted with him briefly, asking what drew him to the ballet. Turns out that Cusack, who ports a strong intellectual bent, is a huge "Rite of Spring" guy. Loving the music and fascinated by the 1913 Stravinsky riots, he ventured to Bunker Hill to see the performance.